Fold Gallery | London is pleased to announce the continuation of our programme of joint solo shows. These consist of two solo shows that run simultaneously, presenting two separate bodies of work within the same space. However, there is no major physical divide within the gallery to set them apart.

The intention is to present the viewer with a unique opportunity to form their own conclusions regarding the relationships between the individual shows. The hope is that the gallery, rather than intervening, is acting as a catalyst for these events to unfold.

Valérie Kolakis

In 1917 Thomas Edison invented and patented a single pour concrete house. Originally, planned as an alternative housing solution, Edison cast only one concrete house which, years later, was torn down to make way for a supermarket and a parking lot.

In her first solo show in London, Valérie Kolakis presents us with deconstructed architectural drawings, steel rods and concrete which all hint at an ‘un-built’ house. Subtraction, vacancy and false references to the urban landscape suggest a construction in the making, or one that has been abandoned. With a nod to Minimalist and Constructivist aesthetics, the work will create an intervention within the space. This will insert the idea of a non-existent presence where a sense that the rebuilding of an ‘object’ contradicts its function.

The decontextualisation of material suggests an emptiness - where an ambiguous quality exists - triggering a sense of displacement and transience. It is this idea of displacement and transience that questions how identity is constructed and subsequently constrained by physical spaces and how a society occupies them.

Finbar Ward

‘There is something death like about a painting finished’ Philip Guston

In his first solo show in London, Finbar Ward presents us with constructions that are born primarily out of the language of painting; the idea that a picture is found or ‘caught out’ during a deferral of closure is what determines the work’s identity.

The work is built up out of the stuff or matter in the artist’s periphery, brought to the fore and exposed in the gallery. Stretchers and stray timbers are stacked, packed and compressed in forms and motifs that allude to the tradition of minimalism, albeit a flat pack incarnation.

Elevated and momentarily preserved in a state of pretend completion, the debris of production is rendered through processes of reassembly and transformation in an endeavor to dramatize, and ultimately, test the potential of painting; the linen surface as likely to find itself hidden away or discarded, as it is to be found mounted on its support.

Anxieties regarding the validity and status of painting have become a driving force in defining the motive behind Ward’s venture, where he endeavors to keep us looking and subvert this ‘death like’ state of the ‘finished’ painting.